Chapter 1: It Looks So Easy

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From the outside, making a documentary seems like the easiest thing in the world. You just go where something interesting is happening, turn on the camera, and record it.

Looked at that way, the most successful American documentarian would be Abraham Zapruder, the Dallas garment manufacturer whose home-movie camera was pointed at President John Kennedy as he was being shot. His three-hundred-plus frames of Super-8 film have probably been the most talked about and widely shown bit of footage in the history of nonfiction film.

Certainly, if you can get camcorder shots of a tornado flattening a town, or a wildfire wiping out million-dollar homes, you can be on TV.

And yes, if you can put together a series of interviews with the right kinds of people sounding concerned about the right kinds of social problems — from AIDS to zoolatry — you can become the darling of the special interest video festivals.

But unfortunately, reality footage of a tornado isn’t a documentary. It’s a news clip. And long interviews with earnest proponents of any sort of social change usually don’t make a documentary, either. What they make is a dull video sermon, acceptable only to those who already side with the speakers. That’s called preaching to the choir.

It Takes More

Making a successful documentary film or video requires much more.

It starts at the camera. You have to have good footage — visual evidence that sets forth the statement of the film in visual terms. And you need more than a simple event. Tornado footage is good, but it is not sufficient. Just saying, “Look at this destruction that happened!” is journalism, not documentary. You need a concept that organizes the material and expresses the point of view of the film. In their VolcanoScapes documentaries about the destruction of the lovely Hawaii coastal town of Kalapana by Kilauea volcano, Artemis and Mick Kalber had incredible footage of homes destroyed by a slow-moving river of lava. And they used it. But they focused their story on the people who had chosen to live and build their homes downhill from an active volcano.

Interviews are not enough. Interviews may help define the point of view, but they are usually a terribly cumbersome way to get the documentary idea across, because they don’t show the topic; they show people talking about the topic. A documentary film needs pictures. For instance, immediately after the opening title, Ken Burns’s The Civil War shows a series of dramatic photographs of war after a battle. The camera moves slowly across each photo, letting you know that in this film much of what you will see will come from still pictures, and you will be given time to see what is there. On the sound track we hear a violin — no speech — as the documentarian shows us that the pictures can speak for themselves.

The Camera Won’t Do It for You

I once worked as house audiovisual guy for a teacher-training project. When the project put on a conference, I’d take snapshots of each day’s activities and display them on the bulletin board the next morning. The teachers told me how much they liked the pictures. And, invariably, the next thing they’d say was, “What kind of camera did you use?”

As if that mattered.

It was a simple, inexpensive, wide-angle-lens, no-frills camera that recorded what it was pointed at. But it wasn’t the camera that made the pictures interesting. It was what the people were doing.

A persistent problem for the modern documentary has been the almost mystical belief of many would-be documentarians that the camera somehow does it all. I vividly recall one academic authority on documentary who questioned whether I was “in sympathy with the cinéma vérité filmmaker’s desire to shoot a wealth of footage as a passive observer, in order to report as self-effacingly as possible as a journalist.”

Well, no. Because that formulation reduces the documentarian to something of a media janitor in charge of an image vacuum machine. Just turn on the machine and it will suck the essence of the event through the lens and store it on film or video. Then all you have to do is reverse the flow and blow your film back in the audience’s faces.

If it were only that easy!

Yes, I’m in favor of shooting a lot of footage, but always as an active, decision-making participant in a process of communication that begins with an idea and ends with an audience. Inexpensive video equipment has placed the possibility of making a documentary within the reach of anyone. But the equipment won’t make your footage interesting. And digital effects and editing systems can’t turn random shots or hours of talking heads into a dramatic documentary statement.

Good Images Don’t Just Happen

I began planning the original version of this book in the mid-’90s while working on the script for Defenders of Midway, a documentary focused on a group of veterans of the famous World War II naval battle. At the start of that project, UPS delivered to my apartment two boxes of VHS windowprint dubs covering 120 half-hour field tapes shot at Midway Atoll. The problems I found with this footage are typical of the problems to be avoided in making a documentary:

  • Lack of planning
  • Inadequate visual evidenc
  • Poor interview technique
  • Obtrusive crew interference with the people in the video

Much of the footage was shot by an award-winning commercial director who wouldn’t dream of shooting a 30-second spot without extensive preproduction planning. But who, at least from the evidence in his footage, went off to shoot an hour documentary with little or no preparation.


It is precisely when you don’t know what is going to happen that preproduction planning is most important.
A group of veterans had returned to Midway fifty years after the historic battle. They had been young Marines, sailors, and airmen in 1942. Fifty years later they were men in their late sixties and seventies who had come to dedicate a memorial and reminisce with one another. I’m sure the producers believed that if the video crew just followed these veterans around and recorded whatever they did and said, they’d have a great film. And the notes I received from one of the producers suggest that he believed they had accomplished exactly that. Unfortunately, his optimism wasn’t borne out in the footage.

Lack of preproduction planning left the project without a unifying concept. And without that, there was no apparent strategy for gathering visual evidence related to the theme.

Half of the tapes were interviews with the veterans. Now, a major problem with interviews is that they’re about people talking when your goal should be to show things happening. Still, this was a historical documentary, and each of these men had a story to tell. Unfortunately they were asked to tell their stories in a static interview conducted by a historian who specialized in oral histories.

Two problems there: First, a static interview is visually boring. Nothing happens. It’s a talking head. Plus the interviews were all filmed in the exact same location — like school yearbook pictures. There was no attempt at making them visually informative. Second, an oral history gathers the facts of a story to be listened to on tape or to be published. That makes it the exact opposite of a documentary interview. In an oral history the interviewer usually has a checklist of items to cover and often will use leading questions, since a yes or no answer still provides the facts. But showing someone listening to an interviewer read a question and then answering yes or no — or possibly just shaking his head — does not make dramatic footage.

In other footage, the veterans go on a boat trip to visit Eastern Island, where several of them had been stationed. And the camera crew goes along — with the camera operator asking questions, giving directions, and generally talking all over the sound track. This would have been an excellent opportunity to do some good on-site interviews as the veterans reminisced about their service on the island, but that opportunity was never taken.

In spite of the problems in the footage, Defenders of Midway ended up a good film, and I’m proud of my part in making it. But if the producers, and the crew that shot the footage, had known more at the beginning about making a documentary, it could have been far better.

And that’s how this book got started.

About This Book

This book is written for the person who wants to make a documentary, for whatever reason, and especially for those interested in recording behavior out there in the real world, either for production of a documentary or for research of some sort.

It brings into focus what I have learned from making and watching documentaries and from trying to help others organize the documentaries they’ve shot. It’s based on a lifetime of love for the nonfiction film in all its permutations.

I have loved making documentaries from the first time I sat down at an editing table and spliced selected pieces of film into a visual statement. I have shot, directed, edited, and written scores of documentary films and videos. And in the quiet hours of the night while I cut film or edited video, I’ve thought a lot about what goes into a successful film. And by “successful” I mean a documentary that communicates to an audience exactly what you intended.

What You Won’t Find Here

This is not a book about using equipment. For one thing, technology changes too quickly. A camera or editing system will be the flavor of the month only until a new one comes along. (On a previous page I mentioned a $4,000 camera, but by the time you read this there may be an equally good one available for less.) But more important, I don’t think of making a documentary as a technical — by which I mean equipment — problem. It is always, from initial concept to final release, a communication problem.

Most of us learn how to operate our technology long before we really have any clear idea of what we want to do with it. Put another way, we can get so caught up in the problems of shooting that we forget about showing. And it is the film the audience sees, not the one the documentarian shoots (or wishes he or she had shot) that counts.

This is also not a book about how to make moneymaking documentaries. I hope that the book will help you to make a good documentary, and that you will be rewarded for your effort. But I have to confess that the financial side of making documentary films is not where my interest lies. Making a documentary takes far too much time and effort to be wasted on anything other than a project you are passionately interested in. “Important” documentaries often become important only after the fact. Initially, they were just something someone fervently wanted to do.

And What You Will Find

This is a book about thinking your way through the documentary process. It starts from the position that truth is the essential element in documentary. And that means documentable, verifiable truth.
Recording a lot of people — even famous people — saying that they do like something or someone, or that they don’t like something or someone, proves nothing about the something or someone except that there are people with strong opinions on the topic.

A documentary must always be an analog of the larger truth. When a film shows something that actually happened, but that is not truly representative, it may be the truth, but it’s not the whole truth. In these days of highly partisan, gotcha politics, that’s an important distinction to remember.
Making a documentary requires:
  • Planning the visual evidence that needs to be recorded
  • Recognizing it when it occurs
  • Selecting and organizing what has been recorded to present a visual argument to your audience

So a substantial portion of this book is devoted to (1) planning what you’re going to do before shooting, and (2) after shooting, selecting and organizing what has been shot into the visual evidence of your film.

Much of what I have learned about documentary filmmaking has been learned under pressure — on location with a small budget and a tight schedule, where every mistake cut deeply. So for every chapter in the book, somewhere I’ve got a scar.

Shooting a documentary is a lot of fun. I’m always up when I set off for a new location to start a film. There’s a kind of automatic status that goes along with being a documentarian. When you walk in with the lights, the sound equipment, and the camera, people assume you know what you’re doing. Even if it’s your first documentary, you are automatically accorded the status of professional. That’s pretty heady stuff.

But a documentarian must never forget that the end of this exciting process is a program that an audience is going to look at — without any explanation from you. The audience will never know how much fun — or how much trouble — you had in getting the pictures. Nor should they.
The audience can be concerned only with the documentary you show them.


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